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Placing Orders

Understanding the Checkout Process

Your customers will usually begin at your home page. Sometimes they will begin from a category page, or a product details page if they came from a search engine.

1. Home page (Default.asp)
2. Category pages / Search Results pages (SearchResults.asp)
3. Product Details page (ProductDetails.asp)
4. Shopping Cart (ShoppingCart.asp)
5. Login (Login.asp)
   1. Login with existing e-mail and password or
   2. Click "create new account" button
6. Create New Account or Modify Existing Account Info (AccountSettings.asp)
   1. Create new e-mail address + choose new password
   2. Enter new shipping address
   3. Enter new billing address if different from shipping address
   4. Choose shipping preference
   5. Enter credit card / payment information
7. Review Order then hit Proceed to Checkout button (one-page-checkout.asp.asp)
8. Order Finished Confirmation / Receipt (OrderFinished.asp)

New customers would follow the above steps intuitively as they shop from your website. Returning customers will skip most of step #6 because when they login to their account they'd have all of their past information saved to allow for a quick checkout process.

Admin Area - Quick Phone Order Page

As an administrator, you can place orders from the front-end of your store simply following the same checkout process as your customer's would, or you may use the Phone Order page in the admin area to take orders over the phone and enjoy some additional tools, control, and features that are useful for taking phone orders quickly.

Placing Orders from the front-end:

1. From the home page of your admin area, in the top right corner click the Logout link
2. Now, from the home page of your store's front-end, go ahead and add all of the products to your cart, then proceed to checkout
3. When asked to login or create a new account, simply create a new account with all of the customer's information. You're basically just placing the order the same way they would.

Placing Phone Orders thru' the Phone Order page:

Navigate to Orders —> Phone Order page, from the home page of your admin area

For a NEW customer —> Create a new account by entering an email, password, and click Create New Account

Note: It is possible to have the customer place the order anonymously, which means that they do not need a Email account to place a order. Simply select "anonymous customer," before filling out the order. The downside to this process is that you will not be able to capture any of the customer's address, or email information. For financial reporting, all anonymous orders are lumped together.

For an EXISTING customer —> Enter the Customer ID and click the Login button and it will pull up the customers email and password. To add products to the Phone Order page:

1. Click on the Go Shopping link to add products to the cart. This will take you to the home page of your storefront.
2. Once products have been added to the shopping cart, close the shopping cart page in your storefront. This will bring you back to the Phone Order page.
3. Click on the REFRESH button in the Phone Order page. This will add / list the products that was added to cart thru your storefront, to the Phone Order Page cart
4. Enter the customers Shipping information, then click Precalculate Tax + Shipping Rates, then choose the shipping method they prefer
5. Enter the customers Billing information and payment details, and click the Place order button

Point of Sale System

Navigate to Orders —> Point of Sale, from the home page of your admin area.

The Point of Sale(POS) system allows you to quickly sell your products to customers who are physically in your store. This also assumes there will be no shipping cost, since the customer will carry his items out of the store.

The point of sale process is just like going to your local supermarket...

1. Use your Barcode Scanner to scan each product. If you have a product without a UPC code or you do not have a barcode scanner, you can simply browse your online store to add the product to the cart.
2. Collect payment: (in any of the following quick ways)
   • Use your Credit Card Swipe to swipe the customer's credit card
   • Enter the cash value handed to you
   • If the customer is paying by check, you may click Proceed to checkout to change payment button to enter the MICR check info button, then click Save Changes
3. Your Receipt Printer quickly prints the receipt + displays the amount of change to give to the customer if paid cash.

The following POS hardware is supported:

• Barcode Scanner
• Credit Card Swipe / Magnetic Stripe Reader
• 3-Inch Receipt Printer

To purchase hardware, you might consider the following hardware vendors:

http://pos.epson.com
http://www.symbol.com
http://www.waspbarcode.com

Or you may want to search eBay for low cost hardware. One of the most inexpensive credit card swipes is the Magtek Credit Card Swipe.

Hooking up the hardware:

Both the Barcode Scanner and the Credit Card Swipe hookup to any computer using the same plug as your keyboard. The barcode scanners and credit card swipes always come with a splitter to allow for everything to plug into the same existing plug on your computer. Whenever you use either of their pieces of hardware, for example, if you scan a barcode, all that does is simulate your keyboard typing. So, for example you can open up any text editor such as Microsoft Word, or notepad, and then just scan a UPC code... wherever your cursor is within the document you'll see it type the UPC code numbers into the document. So the point is that these hardware devices simply save you time, and ensure accuracy since you don't have to type the code, you just scan it. The powerful convenience actually comes from using your e-commerce software in conjunction with this hardware, for example when using the POS System in your admin area, you'll simply have your cursor in the UPC code field, and all you have to do is scan any barcode to add the product to the cart. Quick & Easy.